I think academic scientists are criminally underpaid (especially at the NIH), and really hope something can be done to rectify this. However, I don’t think unionization is the way. Ultimately, unions' power comes from the threat of striking. Unions' demands only have teeth because of their ability to completely suspend economic output for an entire company or industry. This is possible because economic output of most…
Unions in Germany get seats on the corporate board, about the same number as the shareholders do. Public universities receiving NIH grants are a bit different in structure, but there are administrative government boards of one sort or the other at all such institutions, and having union representatives on those boards makes a lot of sense. This would mean researchers have more say over things like how much overhead i…
But the thing is, all organizations should be unionized. Meaning that all employees should always have group voting power to prevent malfeasance against any single employee. Critiques of this common decency mainly come in the form of whataboutism, fear and othering (our wealthy investors might find different non-union suckers, mob-union rule could take away some of our obscene power, what if the workers who make us our money get even lazier?)
The extent of union power is debatable, so maybe it makes sense for workers at a car company to go on strike because stopping production is unthinkable by the owners (capitalists), or maybe teachers should walk off the job because students should stay in school. But researchers walking out would have delayed consequences that might not be seen for half a decade.
So the union power for researchers is not in strikes, but that it moves individual responsibility to the group, which has actual power to effect change. If congress isn't funding the NIH properly, then the union can advocate for its members like a lobbyist and say "hey, if you don't raise our funding, we'll put ads on TV criticizing the committee and individuals cutting our funding. We won't endorse work coming our of the private corporations trying to defund us. We'll challenge pork barrel funding that's been diverted from us in court. We'll.. quiet quit.."